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With those nine columns round me, two and two,

And Moses with the tables . . . but I know

Ye mark me not! What do they whisper thee,

The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands: Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the Child of my bowels, Anselm? Ah, ye hope ripe To revel down my villas while I gasp Bricked o'er with beggar's mouldy traver

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As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. -Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone, Put me where I may look at him! True peach,

Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize! Draw close: that conflagration of my church

-What then? So much was saved if aught were missed!

My sons, ye would not be my death? dig

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Go

The white-grape vineyard where the oilpress stood,

Drop water gently till the surface sink,
And if ye find . . . Ah God, I know not,
I! .

Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, 40
And corded up in a tight olive-frail,1
Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,

Big as a Jew's head cut off at the nape,
Blue as a vein o'er the Madonna's

breast

tine2

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Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his all,

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That brave Frascati villa with its bath, So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,

Like God the Father's globe on both his hands

Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay, For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! 50

Swift as a weaver's shuttle fleet our years: Man goeth to the grave, and where is he? Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black'Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else

Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath?

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The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me, Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance

Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so, The Savior at his sermon on the mount, Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan Ready to twitch the Nymph's last garment off,

1 basket woven of rushes.

need!

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Good, strong, thick, stupefying incensesmoke!

For as I lie here, hours of the dead night, 85 Dying in state and by such slow degrees, I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook, And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,

And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth," drop

Into great laps and folds of sculptor'swork:

And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts

Grow, with a certain humming in my ears, About the life before I lived this life,

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Your soft hand is a woman of itself, And mine the man's bared breast she curls inside.

Don't count the time lost, neither; you must serve

For each of the five pictures we require: It saves a model. So! keep looking so― 25 My serpentining beauty, rounds on rounds! -How could you ever prick those perfect ears,

Even to put the pearl there! oh, so sweet— My face, my moon, my everybody's moon, Which everybody looks on and calls his, 30 And, I suppose, is looked on by in turn, While she looks-no one's: very dear, no less.

You smile? why, there's my picture ready made,

There's what we painters call our harmony!
A common grayness silvers everything,-
All in a twilight, you and I alike
-You, at the point of your first pride in

me

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That length of convent-wall across the way

Holds the trees safer, huddled more inside;

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up brain,

prompt

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The last monk leaves the garden; days In their vexed beating stuffed and stoppeddecrease, And autumn grows, autumn in every- Heart, or whate'er else, than goes on to thing. Eh? the whole seems to fall into a shape As if I saw alike my work and self And all that I was born to be and do, A twilight-piece. (Love, we are in God's hand.

How strange now looks the life he makes us lead;

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This low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand of mine.

Their works drop groundward, but themselves, I know,

Reach many a time a heaven that's shut

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And that cartoon, the second from the I, painting from myself, and to myself, 90 door

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Know what I do, am unmoved by men's

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IIO

day,

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Above and through his art-for it gives I dared not, do you know, leave home all way; That arm is wrongly put-and there again

A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines, Its body, so to speak: its soul is right, He means right-that, a child may understand.

Still, what an arm! and I could alter it: 115 But all the play, the insight and the stretch

Out of me, out of me! And wherefore out?

Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul,

We might have risen to Rafael, I and you! Nay, Love, you did give all I asked, I think

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Had you, with these the same, but brought a mind!

Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged

"God and the glory! never care for gain.
The present by the future, what is that?
Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo! 130
Rafael is waiting: up to God, all three!"
I might have done it for you. So it seems:
Perhaps not. All is as God overrules.
Beside, incentives come from the soul's
self;

For fear of chancing on the Paris lords. The best is when they pass and look aside; But they speak sometimes; I must bear it all.

Well may they speak! That Francis, that first time,

And that long festal year at Fontainebleau!

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'Tis done and past; 'twas right, my instinct said;

Too live the life grew, golden and not gray,

The rest avail not. Why do I need And I'm the weak-eyed bat no sun should

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